A FAULT LOCALIZATION FRAMEWORK TO ALLEVIATE THE IMPACT OF EXECUTION SIMILARITY ¤ LEI ZHAO Key Laboratory of Aerospace Information Security and Trust Computing, Wuhan 430072, P. R. China and Computer School of Wuhan University, Wuhan 430072, P. R. China and State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology Nanjing University, Nanjing, P. R. China zhaolei.whu@gmail.com ZHENYU ZHANG State Key Laboratory of Computer Science, Institute of Software Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, P. R. China zhangzy@ios.ac.cn LINA WANG Key Laboratory of Aerospace Information Security and Trust Computing, Wuhan 430072, P. R. China and Computer School of Wuhan University, Wuhan 430072, P. R. China lnwang@whu.edu.cn XIAODAN YIN Computer School of Wuhan University, Wuhan 430072, P. R. China yinxiaodan.whu@gmail.com Received 13 June 2012 Revised 24 September 2012 Accepted 25 March 2013 Coverage-based fault localization (CBFL) techniques contrast the execution spectra of a pro- gram entity to assess the extent of how much a program entity is being related to faults. However, di®erent test cases may result in similar executions, which further make the execution spectra of program entities be indistinguishable among similar executions. As a consequence, most of the current CBFL techniques are impacted by the noise of indistinguishable spectra. To alleviate the impact of execution similarity and improve the e®ectiveness of CBFL techniques, we propose a general fault localization framework. This framework is general to current * A preliminary version of this paper was published in the 23rd International Conference on Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering (SEKE 2011). International Journal of Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering Vol. 23, No. 7 (2013) 963–998 #.c World Scienti¯c Publishing Company DOI: 10.1142/S0218194013500289 963 Int. J. Soft. Eng. Knowl. Eng. 2013.23:963-998. Downloaded from www.worldscientific.com by Dr. Zhang Zhenyu Zhang on 05/10/17. For personal use only.